A patron saint for difficult marriages

Thomas Craughwell

10/25/12

It must have seemed like the answer to a prayer when
Albrecht, a well-to-do swordmaker, asked Dorothy's parents
for her hand in marriage. Dorothy and her family were poor
peasants; she always had expected that she would marry a
peasant and continue to live in poverty. Instead, Albrecht
took her to his fine house in Marienwerder, (modern-day
Kwidzyn, Poland), a prosperous city that was also the seat of
the local bishop.

If Dorothy was hoping for a fairy tale marriage, Albrecht
proved to be no prince charming. He was verbally and
emotionally abusive. The couple had nine children, but only
the youngest, a daughter, survived to adulthood, which
compounded Dorothy's sorrows.

But their life together was not complete misery. There were
periods when the couple got along. They found one activity at
least that pleased both of them - going on pilgrimage.
Visiting far-off shrines kept Albrecht in a good mood and
provided Dorothy with great consolation. They traveled to the
shrine of Our Lady in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, and to the
shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne, Germany. The pope
declared 1390 a holy year, offering a plenary indulgence to
pilgrims who prayed in the great basilicas of Rome. Dorothy
and Albrecht planned to make the pilgrimage, but as the day
of their departure approached, Albrecht fell seriously ill.
He insisted that Dorothy go to Rome without him. By the time
she walked from Prussia to Rome and back, Albrecht was
dead.

With her husband gone and her only child a nun in a
Benedictine convent, Dorothy was, for the first time in her
life, free to make her own decision about her future. She was
drawn to a life of prayer and penance, but rather than enter
a religious order, as her daughter had, Dorothy chose a
different way, one that was greatly admired at the time. With
the permission of her bishop, Dorothy became a recluse. She
had a tiny room that measured only 6 feet by 9 feet built for
herself off the high altar of St. John's Cathedral. The room
had three windows: one looked onto the street, one overlooked
the cemetery, and the third opened onto the sanctuary so
Dorothy could see Mass and all the liturgical celebrations of
the cathedral. Through this window she would receive holy
Communion, and from here she could contemplate the Blessed
Sacrament. She received her food through the street side
window, and here she also greeted visitors, listened to their
troubles, and agreed to pray for them. There was no door. The
room was completely sealed, and it would not be opened until
Dorothy's death.

Death came for Dorothy sooner than anyone had expected. Just
as her reputation as a saint, a healer and a mystic was being
established in Marienwerder and the surrounding area, Dorothy
died, only a year after she entered her cell. She was buried
in the cathedral and many people came to light candles, leave
flowers and ask for Dorothy's intercession. During the
upheavals of the Reformation, Dorothy's tomb was destroyed.
No one knows what became of her remains, but her cell has
survived and is her shrine. Prussian Catholics venerated
Dorothy as a saint, although she was never formally
canonized. In 1976, Pope Paul VI confirmed devotion to her
and authorized the faithful to venerate her as St. Dorothy of
Montau.

Craughwell is the author of numerous books about the
saints, including Saints Preserved: an Encyclopedia of Relics
(Image Books, 2011) and Saints Behaving Badly (Doubleday,
2006).